proportion between the apparent force of any moral causes we may assign
and their known operation. We are therefore obliged to deliver up that
operation to mere chance, or, more piously, (perhaps more rationally,)
to the occasional interposition and irresistible hand of the Great
Disposer. We have seen states of considerable duration, which for ages
have remained nearly as they have begun, and could hardly be said to ebb
or flow. Some appear to have spent their vigor at their commencement.
Some have blazed out in their glory a little before their extinction.
The meridian of some has been the most splendid. Others, and they the
greatest number, have fluctuated, and experienced at different periods
of their existence a great variety of fortune. At the very moment when
some of them seemed plunged in unfathomable abysses of disgrace and
disaster, they have suddenly emerged. They have begun a new course and
opened a new reckoning, and even in the depths of their calamity and on
the very ruins of their country have laid the foundations of a towering
and durable greatness. All this has happened without any apparent
previous change in the general circumstances which had brought on their
distress. The death of a man at a critical juncture, his disgust, his
retreat, his disgrace, have brought innumerable calamities on a whole
nation. A common soldier, a child, a girl at the door of an inn, have
changed the face of fortune, and almost of Nature.
Such, and often influenced by such causes, has commonly been the fate of
monarchies of long duration. They have their ebbs and their flows. This
has been eminently the fate of the monarchy of France. There have been
times in which no power has ever been brought so low. Few have ever
flourished in greater glory. By turns elevated and depressed, that power
had been, on the whole, rather on the increase; and it continued not
only powerful, but formidable, to the hour of the total ruin of the
monarchy. This fall of the monarchy was far from being preceded by any
exterior symptoms of decline. The interior were not visible to every
eye; and a thousand accidents might have prevented the operation of what
the most clear-sighted were not able to discern nor the most provident
to divine. A very little time before its dreadful catastrophe, there was
a kind of exterior splendor in the situation of the crown, which usually
adds to government strength and authority at home. The crown seemed then
to have obtained some of the most splendid objects of state ambition.
None of the Continental powers of Europe were the enemies of France.
They were all either tacitly disposed to her or publicly connected with
her; and in those who kept the most aloof there was little appearance of
jealousy,--of animosity there was no appearance at all. The British
nation, her great preponderating rival, she had humbled, to all
appearance she had weakened, certainly had endangered, by cutting off a
very large and by far the most growing part of her empire. In that its
acme of human prosperity and greatness, in the high and palmy state of
the monarchy of France, it fell to the ground without a struggle. It
fell without any of those vices in the monarch which have sometimes been
the causes of the fall of kingdoms, but which existed, without any
visible effect on the state, in the highest degree in many other
princes, and, far from destroying their power, had only left some slight
stains on their character. The financial difficulties were only pretexts
and instruments of those who accomplished the ruin of that monarchy;
they were not the causes of it.
Deprived of the old government, deprived in a manner of all government,
France, fallen as a monarchy, to common speculators might have appeared
more likely to be an object of pity or insult, according to the
disposition of the circumjacent powers, than to be the scourge and
terror of them all: but out of the tomb of the murdered monarchy in
France has arisen a vast, tremendous, unformed spectre, in a far more
terrific guise than any which ever yet have overpowered the imagination
and subdued the fortitude of man. Going straight forward to its end,
unappalled by peril, unchecked by remorse, despising all common maxims
and all common means, that hideous phantom overpowered those who could
not believe it was possible she could at all exist, except on the
principles which habit rather than Nature had persuaded them were
necessary to their own particular welfare and to their own ordinary
modes of action. But the constitution of any political being, as well as
that of any physical being, ought to be known, before one can venture to
say what is fit for its conservation, or what is the proper means of its
power. The poison of other states is the food of the new Republic. That
bankruptcy, the very apprehension of which is one of the causes assigned
for the fall of the monarchy, was the capital on which she opened her
traffic with the world.
The Republic of Regicide, with an annihilated revenue, with defaced
manufactures, with a ruined commerce, with an uncultivated and
half-depopulated country, with a discontented, distressed, enslaved, and
famished people, passing, with a rapid, eccentric, incalculable course,
from the wildest anarchy to the sternest despotism, has actually
conquered the finest parts of Europe, has distressed, disunited,
deranged, and broke to pieces all the rest, and so subdued the minds of
the rulers in every nation, that hardly any resource presents itself to
them, except that of entitling themselves to a contemptuous mercy by a
display of their imbecility and meanness. Even in their greatest
military efforts, and the greatest display of their fortitude, they seem
not to hope, they do not even appear to wish, the extinction of what
subsists to their certain ruin. Their ambition is only to be admitted to
a more favored class in the order of servitude under that domineering
power.
This seems the temper of the day. At first the French force was too much
despised. Now it is too much dreaded. As inconsiderate courage has given
way to irrational fear, so it may be hoped, that, through the medium of
deliberate, sober apprehension, we may arrive at steady fortitude. Who
knows whether indignation may not succeed to terror, and the revival of
high sentiment, spurning away the delusion of a safety purchased at the
expense of glory, may not yet drive us to that generous despair which
has often subdued distempers in the state for which no remedy could be
found in the wisest councils?
Other great states having been without any regular, certain course of
elevation or decline, we may hope that the British fortune may fluctuate
also; because the public mind, which greatly influences that fortune,
may have its changes. We are therefore never authorized to abandon our
country to its fate, or to act or advise as if it had no resource. There
is no reason to apprehend, because ordinary means threaten to fail, that
no others can spring up. Whilst our heart is whole, it will find means,
or make them. The heart of the citizen is a perennial spring of energy
to the state. Because the pulse seems to intermit, we must not presume
that it will cease instantly to beat. The public must never be regarded
as incurable. I remember, in the beginning of what has lately been
called the Seven Years' War, that an eloquent writer and ingenious
speculator, Dr. Brown, upon some reverses which happened in the
beginning of that war, published an elaborate philosophical discourse to
prove that the distinguishing features of the people of England had been
totally changed, and that a frivolous effeminacy was become the national
character. Nothing could be more popular than that work. It was thought
a great consolation to us, the light people of this country, (who were
and are light, but who were not and are not effeminate,) that we had
found the causes of our misfortunes in our vices. Pythagoras could not
be more pleased with his leading discovery. But whilst, in that
splenetic mood, we amused ourselves in a sour, critical speculation, of
which we were ourselves the objects, and in which every man lost his
particular sense of the public disgrace in the epidemic nature of the
distemper,--whilst, as in the Alps, goitre kept goitre in
countenance,--whilst we were thus abandoning ourselves to a direct
confession of our inferiority to France, and whilst many, very many,
were ready to act upon a sense of that inferiority,--a few months
effected a total change in our variable minds. We emerged from the gulf
of that speculative despondency, and wore buoyed up to the highest point
of practical vigor. Never did the masculine spirit of England display
itself with more energy, nor ever did its genius soar with a prouder
preëminence over France, than at the time when frivolity and effeminacy
had been at least tacitly acknowledged as their national character by
the good people of this kingdom.
For one, (if they be properly treated,) I despair neither of the public
fortune nor of the public mind. There is much to be done, undoubtedly,
and much to be retrieved. We must walk in new ways, or we can never
encounter our enemy in his devious march. We are not at an end of our
struggle, nor near it. Let us not deceive ourselves: we are at the
beginning of great troubles. I readily acknowledge that the state of
public affairs is infinitely more unpromising than at the period I have
just now alluded to; and the position of all the powers of Europe, in
relation to us, and in relation to each other, is more intricate and
critical beyond all comparison. Difficult indeed is our situation. In
all situations of difficulty, men will be influenced in the part they
take, not only by the reason of the case, but by the peculiar turn of
their own character. The same ways to safety do not present themselves
to all men, nor to the same men in different tempers. There is a
courageous wisdom: there is also a false, reptile prudence, the result,
not of caution, but of fear. Under misfortunes, it often happens that
the nerves of the understanding are so relaxed, the pressing peril of
the hour so completely confounds all the faculties, that no future
danger can be properly provided for, can be justly estimated, can be so
much as fully seen. The eye of the mind is dazzled and vanquished. An
abject distrust of ourselves, an extravagant admiration of the enemy,
present us with no hope but in a compromise with his pride by a
submission to his will. This short plan of policy is the only counsel
which will obtain a hearing. We plunge into a dark gulf with all the
rash precipitation of fear. The nature of courage is, without a
question, to be conversant with danger: but in the palpable night of
their terrors, men under consternation suppose, not that it is the
danger which by a sure instinct calls out the courage to resist it, but
that it is the courage which produces the danger. They therefore seek
for a refuge from their fears in the fears themselves, and consider a
temporizing meanness as the only source of safety.
The rules and definitions of prudence can rarely be exact, never
universal. I do not deny, that, in small, truckling states, a timely
compromise with power has often been the means, and the only means; of
drawling out their puny existence; but a great state is too much
envied, too much dreaded, to find safety in humiliation. To be secure,
it must be respected. Power and eminence and consideration are things
not to be begged; they must be commanded: and they who supplicate for
mercy from others can never hope for justice through themselves. What
justice they are to obtain, as the alms of an enemy, depends upon his
character; and that they ought well to know before they implicitly
confide.
Much controversy there has been in Parliament, and not a little amongst
us out of doors, about the instrumental means of this nation towards the
maintenance of her dignity and the assertion of her rights. On the most
elaborate and correct detail of facts, the result seems to be, that at
no time has the wealth and power of Great Britain been so considerable
as it is at this very perilous moment. We have a, vast interest to
preserve, and we possess great means of preserving it: but it is to be
remembered that the artificer may be incumbered by his tools, and that
resources may be among impediments. If wealth is the obedient and
laborious slave of virtue and of public honor, then wealth is in its
place and has its use; but if this order is changed, and honor is to be
sacrificed to the conservation of riches, riches, which have neither
eyes nor hands, nor anything truly vital in them, cannot long survive
the being of their vivifying powers, their legitimate masters, and their
potent protectors. If we command our wealth, we shall be rich and free:
if our wealth commands us, we are poor indeed. We are bought by the
enemy with the treasure from our own coffers. Too great a sense of the
value of a subordinate interest may be the very source of its danger, as
well as the certain ruin of interests of a superior order. Often has a
man lost his all because he would not submit to hazard all in defending
it. A display of our wealth before robbers is not the way to restrain
their boldness or to lessen their rapacity. This display is made, I
know, to persuade the people of England that thereby we shall awe the
enemy and improve the terms of our capitulation: it is made, not that we
should fight with more animation, but that we should supplicate with
better hopes. We are mistaken. We have an enemy to deal with who never
regarded our contest as a measuring and weighing of purses. He is the
Gaul that puts his _sword_ into the scale. He is more tempted with our
wealth as booty than terrified with it as power. But let us be rich or
poor, let us be either in what proportion we may, Nature is false or
this is true, that, where the essential public force (of which money is
but a part) is in any degree upon a par in a conflict between nations,
that state which is resolved to hazard its existence rather than to
abandon its objects must have an infinite advantage over that which is
resolved to yield rather than to carry its resistance beyond a certain
point. Humanly speaking, that people which bounds its efforts only with
its being must give the law to that nation which will not push its
opposition beyond its convenience.
If we look to nothing but our domestic condition, the state of the
nation is full even to plethora; but if we imagine that this country can
long maintain its blood and its food as disjoined from the community of
mankind, such an opinion does not deserve refutation as absurd, but pity
as insane.
I do not know that such an improvident and stupid selfishness deserves
the discussion which perhaps I may bestow upon it hereafter. We cannot
arrange with our enemy, in the present conjuncture, without abandoning
the interest of mankind. If we look only to our own petty _peculium_ in
the war, we have had some advantages,--advantages ambiguous in their
nature, and dearly bought. We have not in the slightest degree impaired
the strength of the common enemy in any one of those points in which his
particular force consists,--at the same time that new enemies to
ourselves, new allies to the Regicide Republic, have been made out of
the wrecks and fragments of the general confederacy. So far as to the
selfish part. As composing a part of the community of Europe, and
interested in its fate, it is not easy to conceive a state of things
more doubtful and perplexing. When Louis the Fourteenth had made himself
master of one of the largest and most important provinces of
Spain,--when he had in a manner overrun Lombardy, and was thundering at
the gates of Turin,--when he had mastered almost all Germany on this
side the Rhine,--when he was on the point of ruining the august fabric
of the Empire,--when, with the Elector of Bavaria in his alliance,
hardly anything interposed between him and Vienna,--when the Turk hung
with a mighty force over the Empire on the other side,--I do not know
that in the beginning of 1704 (that is, in the third year of the
renovated war with Louis the Fourteenth) the state of Europe was so
truly alarming. To England it certainly was not. Holland (and Holland is
a matter to England of value inestimable) was then powerful, was then
independent, and, though greatly endangered, was then full of energy and
spirit. But the great resource of Europe was in England: not in a sort
of England detached from the rest of the world, and amusing herself
with the puppet-show of a naval power, (it can be no better, whilst all
the sources of that power, and of every sort of power, are precarious,)
but in that sort of England who considered herself as embodied with
Europe, but in that sort of England who, sympathetic with the adversity
or the happiness of mankind, felt that nothing in human affairs was
foreign to her. We may consider it as a sure axiom, that, as, on the one
hand, no confederacy of the least effect or duration can exist against
France, of which England is not only a part, but the head, so neither
can England pretend to cope with France but as connected with the body
of Christendom.
Our account of the war, _as a war of communion_, to the very point in
which we began to throw out lures, oglings, and glances for peace, was a
war of disaster, and of little else. The independent advantages obtained
by us at the beginning of the war, and which were made at the expense of
that common cause, if they deceive us about our largest and our surest
interest, are to be reckoned amongst our heaviest losses.
The Allies, and Great Britain amongst the rest, (and perhaps amongst the
foremost,) have been miserably deluded by this great, fundamental error:
that it was in our power to make peace with this monster of a state,
whenever we chose to forget the crimes that made it great and the
designs that made it formidable. People imagined that their ceasing to
resist was the sure way to be secure. This "pale cast of thought"
sicklied over all their enterprises, and turned all their politics awry.
They could not, or rather they would not, read, in the most unequivocal
declarations of the enemy, and in his uniform conduct, that more safety
was to be found in the most arduous war than in the friendship of that
kind of being. Its hostile amity can be obtained on no terms that do not
imply an inability hereafter to resist its designs. This great, prolific
error (I mean that peace was always in our power) has been the cause
that rendered the Allies indifferent about the _direction_ of the war,
and persuaded them that they might always risk a choice and even a
change in its objects. They seldom improved any advantage,--hoping that
the enemy, affected by it, would make a proffer of peace. Hence it was
that all their early victories have been followed almost immediately
with the usual effects of a defeat, whilst all the advantages obtained
by the Regicides have been followed by the consequences that were
natural. The discomfitures which the Republic of Assassins has suffered
have uniformly called forth new exertions, which not only repaired old
losses, but prepared new conquests. The losses of the Allies, on the
contrary, (no provision having been made on the speculation of such an
event,) have been followed by desertion, by dismay, by disunion, by a
dereliction of their policy, by a flight from their principles, by an
admiration of the enemy, by mutual accusations, by a distrust in every
member of the Alliance of its fellow, of its cause, its power, and its
courage.
Great difficulties in consequence of our erroneous policy, as I have
said, press upon every side of us. Far from desiring to conceal or even
to palliate the evil in the representation, I wish to lay it down as my
foundation, that never greater existed. In a moment when sudden panic is
apprehended, it may be wise for a while to conceal some great public
disaster, or to reveal it by degrees, until the minds of the people have
time to be re-collected, that their understanding may have leisure to
rally, and that more steady councils may prevent their doing something
desperate under the first impressions of rage or terror. But with regard
to a _general_ state of things, growing out of events and causes already
known in the gross, there is no piety in the fraud that covers its true
nature; because nothing but erroneous resolutions can be the result of
false representations. Those measures, which in common distress might be
available, in greater are no better than playing with the evil. That the
effort may bear a proportion to the exigence, it is fit it should be
known,--known in its quality, in its extent, and in all the
circumstances which attend it. Great reverses of fortune there have
been, and great embarrassments in council: a principled regicide enemy
possessed of the most important part of Europe, and struggling for the
rest; within ourselves a total relaxation of all authority, whilst a cry
is raised against it, as if it were the most ferocious of all despotism.
A worse phenomenon: our government disowned by the most efficient member
of its tribunals,--ill-supported by any of their constituent parts,--and
the highest tribunal of all (from causes not for our present purpose to
examine) deprived of all that dignity and all that efficiency which
might enforce, or regulate, or, if the case required it, might supply
the want of every other court. Public prosecutions are become little
better than schools for treason,--of no use but to improve the dexterity
of criminals in the mystery of evasion, or to show with what complete
impunity men may conspire against the commonwealth, with what safety
assassins may attempt its awful head. Everything is secure, except what
the laws have made sacred; everything is tameness and languor that is
not fury and faction. Whilst the distempers of a relaxed fibre
prognosticate and prepare all the morbid force of convulsion in the body
of the state, the steadiness of the physician is overpowered by the very
aspect of the disease.[22] The doctor of the Constitution, pretending to
underrate what he is not able to contend with, shrinks from his own
operation. He doubts and questions the salutary, but critical, terrors
of the cautery and the knife. He takes a poor credit even from his
defeat, and covers impotence under the mask of lenity. He praises the
moderation of the laws, as in his hands he sees them baffled and
despised. Is all this because in our day the statutes of the kingdom are
not engrossed in as firm a character and imprinted in as black and
legible a type as ever? No! the law is a clear, but it is a dead letter.
Dead and putrid, it is insufficient to save the state, but potent to
infect and to kill. Living law, full of reason, and of equity and
justice, (as it is, or it should not exist,) ought to be severe, and
awful too,--or the words of menace, whether written on the parchment
roll of England or cut into the brazen tablet of Borne, will excite
nothing but contempt. How comes it that in all the state prosecutions of
magnitude, from the Revolution to within these two or three years, the
crown has scarcely ever retired disgraced and defeated from its courts?
Whence this alarming change? By a connection easily felt, and not
impossible to be traced to its cause, all the parts of the state have
their correspondence and consent. They who bow to the enemy abroad will
not be of power to subdue the conspirator at home. It is impossible not
to observe, that, in proportion as we approximate to the poisonous jaws
of anarchy, the fascination grows irresistible. In proportion as we are
attracted towards the focus of illegality, irreligion, and desperate
enterprise, all the venomous and blighting insects of the state are
awakened into life. The promise of the year is blasted and shrivelled
and burned up before them. Our most salutary and most beautiful
institutions yield nothing but dust and smut; the harvest of our law is
no more than stubble. It is in the nature of these eruptive diseases in
the state to sink in by fits and reappear. But the fuel of the malady
remains, and in my opinion is not in the smallest degree mitigated in
its malignity, though it waits the favorable moment of a freer
communication with the source of regicide to exert and to increase its
force.